Tami Simon: You're listening to Insights at the Edge. Today my guest is Donna Eden. Donna has treated over 10,000 individual clients and has taught hundreds of classes speaking to standing-room-only audiences throughout the United States, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and South America. Donna has been able, from childhood, to perceive the body's subtle energies. She works with those energies to heal others and to teach others how to work with them. With Sounds True, Donna, along with her partner David Feinstein, has created a multimedia kit called The Energy Medicine Kit: Simple, Effective Techniques to Help You Boost Your Vitality and Feel Better Now. In The Energy Medicine Kit, she teaches over 30 specific on-the-spot energy healing exercises to strengthen the immune system, alleviate fatigue and chronic pain, focus and sharpen the mind, stabilize emotional energies, and more. The Energy Medicine Kit contains a DVD, 21 exercises on audio, and 43 photo-illustrated cards which teach you the specific energy medicine exercises.

In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Donna and I spoke about her unique life gifts and challenges as someone who both sees energy and has also healed herself from serious medical challenges using the techniques of energy medicine. We also spoke about taking on other people's illnesses and experiences as part of working as a healer, and why Donna actually embraces this unusual approach. We talked about the need to evolve, the fight-flight-or-freeze response, and Donna also shared an energy medicine technique for doing so. She also shared a technique for opening with total trust to the energy of the heavens. Here's my conversation, a beautiful and uplifting conversation, with Donna Eden.

Donna, I find you such an unusual person, and such a gifted healer. But I wanted to start right here in the beginning by having you help me get a sense of what it might be like to live inside of you. And I'm serious. And what I mean by that is, how do you experience the world? How to do experience the world and people and situations?

Donna Eden: [Laughs] Well, first I'd like to say that I was probably 21 years old before I knew that the whole world didn't see energy. I thought every human being on earth saw energy. And when I found out they didn't—my first husband was going to put me in a mental institution for saying such things, he was afraid people would think I was nuts—I didn't know how people made up their minds about things. I didn't know how they figured out what to do. Over time I think I understood it better, because I think other people develop their left brains stronger than I did. I'm very right-brained, and I just followed energy. I mean, I watched and followed and felt energy all my life, and that's how I maneuvered through life, and I still do, although I'm fascinated with brilliant minds. And I think that maybe I'm evolving that way more—where other people might be trying to get less left-brained, I'm getting more.

But I think one of the hardest things for me has been—you know, I'm past menopause now. And it's a lot easier. When I used to be pre-menstrual, I could not turn it off at all, so that if I walked down the street, I could see who had cancer, or who had heart problems, or who was suffering from some emotional trauma, and I would want to—and sometimes I did—I'd grab people and say, "Let me help you!" And want to help them, long before I had a practice. So I didn't have boundaries. I would just merge, almost, with another person. And I've come to find out, over the last 30 years, how to let that happen and not harm me in any way, because I also used to pick up everybody's everything. But not so much anymore.

I also loved it, by the way. I loved that there were no boundaries. I also felt like I could look at people and even if they had things in their energy field that seemed not-so-right, or even harmful to anybody else, you could also see their beauty and their wonder. I have always been humbled by human beings, how really good they are. Nobody has ever asked that in an interview, by the way! [Laughs]

TS: Well, you've actually already said a lot that I want to go into in a bit more detail here. Walking down the street and you can see that somebody has cancer—you know, people use this word "energy" so differently and mean different things. So I want to really understand what you see when you meet somebody or feel or sense—try to unpack it in more full way for me.

DE: OK, well, I can see very clearly nine different energy systems. And on each of those systems, I will see different things. I will also feel different things on each of the systems. So if somebody is very very excited or happy, it will really show up in their aura. It will come up in [bright colors] and their aura goes out very far. So that you can see very very quickly. If somebody isn't in that state, but a disease is—maybe they don't even know they have a disease, but it's started to get strong in their body, it will be louder and more visible than anything in their aura, or their chakras get—it will be different, because different cancers have a different energy. But it always moves faster than the human body. There's a certain speed or rhythm that all energies have and disease usually goes faster. And that's why a lot of people succumb, I think, to diseases. Even when they're using the best healing techniques, they can't overcome the speed of the illness. So that's there.

If I see somebody feeling very shy, their aura pulls in really really tight to them. I think [what] always confused me: you can see when somebody is saying something different, like maybe not telling the truth, that's different than their energy. And I'm not a suspicious person—

TS: What does that look like to you, when you see that?

DE: Well, there's a resonance, or coherence when somebody's telling the truth. Everything is aligned up. And when [they start] to speak and it doesn't match anything in their energy—because their chakras tell a story, their aura tells a story, everything is telling this story, and their words have an energy that doesn't match. They're being doesn't even match. And so it's either they're telling an untruth, or they don't know what the truth is, or they're trying to search for it.

Sometimes I see that, when somebody is trying to search for the truth. People often feel like they have to give an answer real quick when somebody asks them a question. But sometimes—and I see it in children a lot—you can see them searching. It's like little energy beings going out into their field, trying to find the answer, and then they land on something that might not have anything to do with truth at all, but they were doing the best they could.

TS: Now, you said you see, feel, sense nine different energy systems. Did you come up with this categorization of the nine different energy systems trying to understand all the information you were receiving?

DE: I never even had a name for the systems. They were just so a part of me [organically] that I just sort of categorized it in my own way. After I healed my self—and that's how I got into this professionally, I healed myself from something that I wasn't supposed to be able to heal from—David interviewed me to try to understand what [the systems were.]

I would say two-thirds of them, of those energy systems, are systems that have been categorized by other cultures. So then I could say, "Oh, that's what I've been talking about!" I really needed some titles and names that other people have named. There's a few that I haven't found it another culture yet. They probably are [named], I just haven't come across that culture that has [them]. I've given them names myself for lack of anything I could find in any kind of literature.

TS: I definitely want to get into what those systems are, and what you've called them. But we're going to hold off for a moment. I want to understand more what this illness was that you had and how your own gifts were able to be applied to the healing of that illness.

DE:OK. At 16 years old, I [was diagnosed with] multiple sclerosis, and it got progressively worse—except when I was pregnant, somehow all symptoms would go away, but after pregnancy they would come back. By the time I was 29, I was in real trouble, and [started to not] be able to walk anymore. I had a buzzing that went all over my body and my face and my hands for the next two years. It felt like everything was asleep, and sometimes it would be so extreme on my face [that] I couldn't form words anymore, because I couldn't have any control over my muscles.

I went to five different supposedly great experts in the world who all said not only was this happening, that I had multiple sclerosis, but my organs were breaking down so fast that two of these five [told] me that I wouldn't be alive in nine months. And the other three, it spread out further: one said, "You won't be around somewhere between two and three years," [another] said I wouldn't be alive, and I'd better figure out what I was going to do with my kids, and there was no cure, and my organs were breaking down.

I was allergic to everything [at this point], so the only food I could eat that I would not have an extreme allergic reaction to—often ending up in the hospital—was red meat. I've often thought the reason why it was red meat is because multiple sclerosis is a breakdown of the myelin sheaths, which is protein, and your body needs protein so bad, and you know, meat is a really dense protein, so that's the only thing I could eat.

So when I was diagnosed with this, and given the dire consequences of death, somehow, I can't tell you why, but somehow I was not afraid. What came instantly was, "I guess I'm going to have to heal myself. They don't know what to do." And I immediately quit going to doctors, never again to go to a doctor. That day, I put one hand on my knee, and one hand on my upper leg, and I noticed that it took about three minutes before this area of my body, where I couldn't move at all anymore, suddenly I could see and feel energy crossing between my hands. And I realized, well, I could do that everywhere! That was just the beginning. But I just started following the energy. What was it that I was seeing that didn't look like it was working right, and how could I work with that energy to make myself healthy and stronger?

That's how it all started, and then very interesting things happened. After having been—really, I'd been allergic much of my life to most things, and in seven weeks' time, I lost all allergies to wheat and grains. I'd never been able to eat bread all my life. Suddenly they were gone. It came in stages, [and] I got healthier and healthier. Suddenly I could move my mouth, and I could talk really well. My legs started getting stronger. Everything started getting better. And I started being able to metabolize food. I had asthma really bad too, which probably was just because my organs were breaking down. And my asthma started going away. Everything started getting better! I almost had a heart attack at 27, and my heart started getting strong. I just got well!

[After that] I wanted to show it to everybody who had any kind of [illness], especially autoimmune illness, because I thought, I know something and I think I can teach this to people. And so, just out of the blue, without advertising or anything, people started coming to me who had autoimmune illnesses, because I understood that something had made the energies in my body—or somebody else's body—turn against their own body. [I was asking,] what was that? Could you straighten out the energy so that it would not be fighting you anymore?

I've learned so much during that time, because what I realized is we evolved for a world that no longer exists, and that's why so many people have autoimmune illnesses. Our energies evolved for millions of years to be in alignment with the environment around us, and now we're no longer aligned up. Now our energies have to counter all sorts of environmental toxins—often pharmaceutical medicines. You can literally interfere with our body's natural process of healing.

So it wasn't a thing about really healing you, it was about straightening out the energy so it knew how to either acclimate or adapt to the energies that your body had to contend with. And when you did that, a person's body already knows how to heal. Inside of us, I believe with all my heart, our bodies' best medicine is energy. That's the best medicine, because it already knows how to heal us and fuel us and restore us. We have to somehow know the ways to listen to what our bodies are saying. It's the life force! Energy's the life force, and it is the most astounding intelligence, I think, on the planet.

TS: I'm curious though, so many of the techniques that you now teach to today, you discovered not through studying energy medicine with other people, but really through working on yourself?

DE: Yes. The majority I did. As time went on, I would be fascinated when I would see somebody do something and I could watch what was happening in their energy. Like, sometimes, even today when I'm teaching a class, there will be somebody in the audience who does another form of healing or exercises, and I'll just invite them to come on the stage and I will show them what their practice is doing to energy and how it will affect and empower and make somebody healthy. All the things that have really survived for thousands of years are types of energy medicine. I love doing that, I love having somebody in my class that leads another type of healing, and I like to show them what it's doing.

That's another thing I got through Touch for Health. That organization is still around, but in the 70s, the Touch for Health organization was the only place out there where I know I could really learn how to show people what it is I was seeing. And they taught muscle testing—now, over time I've changed it into Energy Testing, because it's not about the strength of muscles. But they really taught me that, and it's been wonderful to be able to teach other people who do not see energy that they can find out what's going on in another person's body, to this sort of biofeedback tool of energy testing.

TS: I think what you're saying makes sense, that it was a combination of working on yourself and then being so curious and observing. Now, just a little bit more about your own biographical life, which is, here you're born with this gift of seeing nine different kinds of energy, and several types that we haven't even found documented, necessarily, in other traditions—which we're going to get to. And also, you had a tendency in your life, or your body has had a constitutional weakness towards certain kinds of illnesses. What do you see is the connection between these two things, in your own life?

DE: Well, I think there may be two or three things going on. One is, first of all, I deeply believe that most human beings born in the world can see energy. They can. But by the time they're a year old, nobody keeps it alive. It tends to go dormant. I mean, we are so multi-sensoried, and most of it is dormant in most people, because they live up in their heads, or they have planning, or whatever.

I had a mother who was an orphan who was never adopted. And she was raised in the orphanage, and she was never told that you couldn't see energy, and she always did. And so from the time we were born—my brother, my sister, and I—my mother just talked about it all the time. You know, "What color do you see around that person? Do you happen to see that?" She was so into energy and what all it meant. So we were just raised with that. Now, my sister is not into the healing world at all, but she sees energy. And my brother is a real redneck truck driver, and he sees energy, but it's not something he talks about in the bars, because people don't get it. But I believe it's because my mother kept it alive.

I want to say, I'm sure you, Tami, have picked up a baby, and had that baby look all around your head and not at you. It happens so often when you pick up a little baby. They're looking at your aura, and not at you. But it goes dormant. And one of the great things that I love, because I teach this all over the place, is I love when somebody's been studying this for awhile, and they start to see energy again. I've had numerous people begin to open. I've also had people begin to hear energy, which I can't do, but I can see it and feel it. But I have people who can hear it. And then we will test each other in a class, so it's kind of like a double-blind test so we don't know what each other is saying and the audience is doing. We were right on. It matches. So I think the world is going to have much more of that, of people being open to the senses in that way.

And the other question you asked me is, how much of that involved my own illness.

TS: Or what you think the relationship is. What you think the relationship might be.

DE: Well, I think there is a relationship with that, too. I've taught thousands of people, and sometimes somebody will come through and was a private client of mine or has come to classes, and would say, "I'll never be able to do this because I'm so sick, I've got to get myself well first!" And the first thing I always want to say is, oh my gosh, it's like people who have to heal themselves begin to learn things on themselves. Maybe they need a beginning, maybe what I'm teaching. Then they can take that as diving board, and dive off into areas that nobody knows, and they begin to heal themselves. I would say nine times out of ten those people who learn how to heal themselves become healers, because you learn something, because you have a sensitivity that you begin to open up to, and say, "Well, the sensitivity always hurt me because I always picked up everything. Now I can learn to use that sensitivity in a positive way."

I pick up everybody's stuff too, by the way. But I learned how to move it through my body and not get stuck. And when it moves through, I feel better, I'm healthier afterward. I see people with a lot of fears about not wanting to work on this person or be in this group with that person, because that person could throw their energies off. I think it's a sorrowful thing that people have to be afraid of anybody. If you know that whatever energy comes into you you can move it right through, it does something for you, it clears you, but you also have compassion for that other person afterward. Because not only [does] the energy that you didn't want to go through you go through you, but you get other stuff about that person, too. It's something that I like teaching.

TS: Let's talk a little bit about that, Donna, because you said that earlier in your life, when you experienced other people's energetics, that it would stay with you for a longer period, and that you didn't really understand about boundaries, but that you've come a long way in the last 30 years. So I'm curious, what have you discovered about how to be an affective healer who doesn't hold on to this material?

DE: First of all, back in the 70s, when I was just starting as a practice, I found that the books that were out and the guidance that was out didn't work for me. I think that's important, that people need to know that they are individuals, they are unique. Their energy is as unique as a thumbprint. So something might not work for you that will work for everybody.

For instance, for me, it never worked—all of the great guidance of the greats that told you how to not take on people's energy or take on their sickness didn't work. So I had to learn to not be afraid of it at all, not to put up any kind of white light to protect me and to protect them, but just allow it to come on in. And I do that to this very day. I allow it. I don't have those kinds of boundaries still, but I learned to make it work for me and for them, because it pays off for us both. And I do know that I have a passion about it, about people not being afraid to take on or getting hit by others people's energy, or even the environmental things that at one time really took me down. And I just know how to move it though me.

TS: Tell me how you do that.

DE: OK. This is really simplistic. I used to think I could just say it, and people would have it, but they don't. But I do teach it in classes, how to do this. The very first time it happened to me, I was working on somebody, and I suddenly picked up their Guillain-Barré—their French polio. The person was paralyzed, and suddenly, I had their paralysis. I couldn't move, and I had my fingers on two parts of their body. That person was coming out of paralysis, and I was getting it. I suddenly couldn't talk. I was paralyzed, and I didn't know what I was going to do. Suddenly, what I thought was two things began to happen: I imagined that I had a spigot at the bottom of my tailbone. And I could just imagine and see it all inside of me, and every place that was suddenly frozen would just spill out the spigot. I could turn on that faucet and it would spill out, and I imagined mother earth loving it as fertilizer, you know.

That was the beginning, but then there have been other times where it was—I always use that [technique]. It happens automatically, but there have been times where I have even asked for help outside of me. Sometimes, when I've been working on someone, I can only say that it's like some other energy outside of me, out in the ethers, whether it be an angel or whatever you want to call it. I have, at times, just gotten really still and could feel that being taken out of me. And I just know that sometimes we get help from another realm, and I don't want to preach about that, but it's just sort of, wow, I've gotten help, and I'm amazing at the help I've gotten. But [I] always [find that] the spigot works.

I also learned how to open up the bottoms of my feet, because at the bottoms of your feet are receptive energies. When you feel fabulous and you're walking on the earth, out in the country somewhere, and feel that connection to the planet, you can also release to the planet when all of those openings on the bottom of your feet are open. Things spill out of your feet easily, and it just automatically happens, you don't have to think about it or anything. So it's something that I teach people who—sometimes if they're very mental, or have a very strong left brain, they have to find a way to be able to let the energy flow, to do that.

TS: So just to understand, when you work with somebody as an energy healer, is the primary method or primary part of the healing that you're taking into your own being whatever it is they're suffering from and processing it yourself?

DE: No, that isn't primary. That happens if I'm going into really deep territory, and I know that this person is in a critical place and really needs to turn around. That's what can often happen. But my primary thing is teaching people how to unscramble their force fields so that all their energy systems will be in alignment and strong and empowered. [It's also teaching people] they can know how to get their energy back quickly if they lose it, how to clear their mind when it feels fuzzy, how to lift themselves out of depression or despair, how to take away their own pain—how to do all these thing without Western medicine.

I think my most primary thing is I teach people, if they will do a five minute routine every day twice a day, then they will start building a stronger habit in their energy systems. [Then,] when something comes along that can really throw their energies off, or if suddenly they had energy and they don't have it [anymore], they will: 1. be able to get that energy back, but, 2. their body builds habits. The body's energies build habits so that you only get healthier the more you do it, and you're just not as vulnerable to things taking you down in the first place.

It is also an amazing complement. If you are going to do Western medicine, it really complements it. For instance, a lot of hospitals are—not a lot, I shouldn't say a lot, [but] there are hospitals in the United States that do energy work now. MD Anderson [Cancer Center] in Orlando, Florida, has their own department of energy medicine now, because they have found, for instance, when women are going through chemotherapy or radiation, there are two techniques that, if you do them while they're going through chemotherapy or radiation, they [will] have very little side effects. Women often don't lose their hair or get nauseated, because the body learns, "This is not something that I have to freak out over," and give you side effects. You teach the body that you're not being poisoned, that this is something good. And the body really learns fast.

TS: So Donna, when you were describing the example of the person with French polio, and taking that into your body, does that kind of experience happen to you only when you're really trying to help someone who's in a desperate situation? Or does it sometimes just happen to you when you meet somebody or are with somebody that you feel what they're feeling?

DE: Yes, yes. It can happen anywhere, and again, I think most of my life, I was told that this was a very bad thing, that you've got to protect yourself and save yourself from that [experience]. I really appreciate when that happens to me. I like feeling what somebody else is feeling. I like being at one with somebody. I always think that I'm lucky, and I always feel like it makes each of us not so alone when you go to that place. And I also, sometimes I'm not super articulate, but I've found when I can feel where they're at, I can search for my words and feed it back to them. I think that the world is going to survive better the more people find that [it's] a good thing to feel that connected.

TS: I think part of the reason that feeling other people's experience like that might get a bad rap, if you will, is that then people can sometimes be stuck in someone else's experience. They're not moving it through the way you're describing.

DE: Yes. That's exactly right, and there's so much I see. I know there are a lot of reasons for fear in this world, but one of them—just in my work, I see people so afraid to take on someone else's energy, not want to be with them, or do this or that, because they're fearful. But if you know that energy will move through you—here's something else: not only that, it empowers you physically, emotionally, spiritually, every which way, you are empowered.

When I was younger, I didn't quite understand this, but I was never afraid of anything. And I came to understand this as an adult: the reason why I wasn't [afraid] is because I could move the experience through me and my body felt stronger afterwards. So I was in many situations where other people would tell me, "Oh my God, what you went through! How come this didn't happen, and that [didn't happen]!" I've never been afraid to walk in dark alleys or down into neighborhoods where you could be killed. That never ever frightened me, and it wasn't that I was bravado; it was that it didn't even occur to me to worry about it. And it's because when you move energy through you, there is an empowerment.

My sister is a writer, and she wrote about it probably 20 years ago, talking about an experience she had with me. We were in a New York ghetto and walking through a tunnel at nighttime, and she's talking about how I'm not even noticing, and just not into it at all. This gang was coming our way and she was terrified and everything. But for me, it was—I guess it's pretty stupid when you hear what I said, but I said, "Oh my God, you look just like gang members!" That's what I said! But it doesn't hit me [to be afraid] in that way.

TS: As I said, Donna, you're a very unusual person. [Laughs]

DE: [Laughs] But it turned out to be a wonderful day with them! So my life is enriched, and I love it when I see other people. Somehow I shift into that, because it makes life better. It just makes life better, I think. I'm so passionate about teaching people tools to empower themselves and their children. So [for] children, [when they have trouble] in school, it's just about healing energy. As Einstein said, it's everything. Energy is all there is. It is a foundation of everything. I grew up very dyslexic. Never in a million years would I have thought that I could be on a radio show with you. Or teach, as I do, because even as I spoke, I transposed words, so I would put one word in front of the other. And in school, I couldn't do math because I would transpose the numbers. They'd think I got it wrong, but I just transposed them and end up with the wrong answer. I don't have dyslexia anymore, and it was just from straightening my energies out.

So one of the great joys in my life—and I can't do it very much anymore, because I'm just on the road trying to teach people how to do this. But I [did volunteer work] before my first book came out. Once a week I would go into schools and teach kids how to unscramble their force fields so that they could take in what the teacher was saying, understand the subject, what to do before a test so their energies were unscrambled and they could learn better. I would go into a classroom and the teacher would [start to] invite me after awhile, because I was getting sort of [known for my work in the] school systems. The teacher would say, "I don't know why my kids can't learn. I don't know why I've got a class this year where it seems that everyone is falling behind." And it would be the teacher's energy that was so scrambled! She put out a crooked energy and the kids couldn't learn. And so I would work with her, and she would see [that] her kids would then start turning around and start learning. So there's just so much to be taught and learned in the world of energy medicine!

TS: Yes. And there's actually so much I want to talk to you about, Donna, but I'm going to try to get right to it. This is a small question, but it's something you said at the very beginning, which was that now that you're post-menopausal, you have more control. When you had your menstrual cycle, it was like all barriers were down. And I'm curious if you could just explain that, that was a very curious statement to me.

DE: Well, you know, even my second book, Energy Medicine for Women, I wrote from the experiences that I learned just how hormonal I was. I didn't know anybody who had as bad of PMS as I did, and it was partly because of my sensitivities. There were seven to ten days of the month where I could not turn any sensitivity off. I also couldn't turn off my need to help people right at a time when I probably should have been taking some moon-hut time like they do in other cultures and be alone, because it was hard to be in the world. That was the very time I couldn't say no to anybody.

I had a practice in a small town—Ashland, Oregon—and many many many people in that town had it on their calendars when I was premenstrual.

TS: [Laughs]

DE: Because they wanted a session during that time! Because I was so psychic, I was never wrong during that time. And if they wanted to know what was going on in their bodies, too, or anything, mentally or whatever, I was right on. The other times of the month I had a little bit of protection, but not much. But [at this time] there was none there. So when I went through menopause, other people were saying just how awful it was for [them], I thought, "Oh my God, this is incredible! This is wonderful!" I just did things in reverse.

But I find now that I'm post-menopausal, I have more energy than I have ever had in my entire life. And my body—I know this has happened, because I've seen it happen to lots and lots and lots of other people—has evolved to be able to throw off stuff that could hit it. I have a very healthy heart. You know, after having a really bad heart for the first 30 years of my life—in bed as a little girl and a heart attack at 27—my heart is in great shape. I don't have any sensitivity toward MS, and they say you'll have it all your life. No. It's just not true. You can evolve your body so it can tolerate the things in this world much better. You don't have to pay attention so much. You can just enjoy your life.

TS: One of the topics we said we would circle back around to, and I want to, is that you identified these different energy systems in the body, many of which have been documented and taught in other world traditions—Chinese medicine, etc.—but which are the energy systems in the body that you see and experience that you haven't noted any other traditions documenting?

DE: It's interesting. I think in the last couple of years, I've seen a couple of other people write something that is quite similar, so I think it's starting to come up. But for 30 years, I've taught how to put in a person's grid, and it's just for lack of a better word [that] I called it a grid because it looks like a grid. And it's like, if you think of a building when they're starting to lay down the foundation, and they want to make sure the foundation is really good before they build everything on top.

Often when people go through something hard, whether it be emotionally or physically or spiritually, whatever it is, the thing that threw them off—their body went through an earthquake and their foundation got thrown off. So they might go through years and years of healing, and doing everything right, but how come they don't feel real energetic? Or how come they don't have all their health back or their happiness back when they "should"? And often it's because they had an earthquake to their being, and their foundation never got put back. So that's one thing I teach.

I teach something called "radiant circuits," and I think I'm the best person on the planet to teach radiant circuits, because—and by the way, in these later years I've found that they are very similar to what the Japanese call "strange flows," and there are systems of Japanese work where they work with strange flows. But because I didn't work with them, I just named it myself, "radiant circuits," I learned something I think that you wouldn't learn if you went through a traditional way of learning it. I'm very sure that radiant circuits predate meridians or chakras, and maybe not the aura, but maybe the aura.

Radiant circuits are the energies that will travel anywhere they need to or want to or see fit to in your whole body and outside your body. [They know] how to connect it up. The best way I can talk about it is, when you first fall in love, and you're walking on cloud nine, your radiant circuits are hooked up. But there are eight or nine radiant circuit pathways that you can hook up and they will do different things. One is that bliss state, and for moments you might feel it if you're seeing a sunset and you've never seen anything like that in your life. You get hit through your whole being. All your circuitry is turned on. Another way, there's a circuitry called a "penetrating flow," and it penetrates you deep, so that you can get it on a soul level and you know it. It can hit you in joy, but it can also hit you in sorrow. It can hit you in the meaning of things mentally, it can hit you spiritually, it can hit you every which level. That's one.

There's a system that is actually a part of Chinese traditional medicine, but I believe it goes far beyond. And like all cultures that haven't evolved their understanding of a system—sometimes cultures really have the basics, but I think they can't keep in within lines or framework. It goes far beyond that. So there's a system that I think is incredibly important called "triple warmer." Triple warmer is also named for a meridian in Chinese medicine, but [it goes] beyond everything that the Chinese and acupuncture schools teach as triple warmer. I know it as far more than that.

Triple warmer is probably the first energy that humans and animals and everybody had, in the sea, anywhere. It was the first energy, because it governs the fight-flight-or-freeze response. So that has been incredibly powerful and really needs to be evolved now. That's a system that needs to be evolved because it hasn't changed since prehistoric times. We still react to a stress when it hits in the same way: we lose blood from our forebrain, and it goes into the body for the fight-or-flight response, and under heavy stress it can be 80 percent of the blood from our forebrain. Yet we live in a world where we're meant to be thinking things through, but we don't even have all our blood up there!

TS: So when you say, Donna, that it has to be evolved, you mean that we need a new way of dealing with fight-flight-or-freeze and when that response is evoked in us?

DE: Absolutely! Absolutely, because that system is so strong in us, [but] we don't have saber tooth tigers that we have to fight and run away from. But that system can get turned on if suddenly your computer crashes, or if somebody cuts you off in traffic. It [causes] an incredible wear and tear in our bodies [when] you're on alert so much of the time. And we really need to bring in its opposite force in the radiant circuits so that people can have more joy. Also because that triple warmer fight-or-flight is on so much, it has the ability and the mandate to take energy from anywhere it wants, out of any meridian, out of any of the aura bands, anywhere, to fight a stress. But then it's not available to you if you start to get cancer. It's not available to you when you have the flu. Because it's trying to get rid of the stress build-up that you've got in your body.

So one of the most important things, I think, [that] I teach is how to help triple warmer work with the other energies, so that you aren't on alert all the time, and yet it will still be there if you really need it.

TS: Is there a simple energy medicine technique you can share with us to help us evolve our triple warmer response?

DE: OK, I'll give you one. There's a lot of them, by the way. But a simple one is: Rub your hands to together and just shake them off for a minute, just so if you've got any stress on your hands, it just empties it for a minute. Then take your fingers and lay them sideways over your eyes, and take one deep breath in, and as you let your breath out, pull your fingers across your eyeballs to your temples, and let your breath out completely. Then take another in breath, and push your fingers, with some pressure, above your ears. And as you let your breath out, take them around your ears and down your neck, and hang on your shoulders. Now you can stay at your shoulders as long as you want. At this point, take a deep breath in, this is your third breath, push your fingers into your shoulders, drag them across your shoulders, and land in the middle of your chest on your heart chakra, with both your hands, one hand on top of the other, and just take one deep breath there and let go.

This will do several things: it will start taking your stress level down, it will start teaching that energy system to not be on alert all the time, it will help your immune system so that it's more ready to handle any kind of illness or disease that comes along. And you are literally evolving that part of your body so that you can live a healthier, happier life.

TS: That was fabulous, Donna. Can we do it one more time together? Will you take me through it one more time?

DE: Yes. OK. Lay your fingers sideways, over your eyes. Not holding deeply, but not too light either, just kind of a calm firmness. And take a deep breath in. And as you let your breath out, drag your fingers over your eyes sideways to your temples, and let your breath out all the way. Now take a deep breath in here, with your fingers on your temples, and let your breath out again. Now take a nother inbreath and slide your fingers, with some pressure, but not a lot, up over your ears. So you're up above your ears. And as you let your breath out, come around the back side if your ears, and come down your neck, and hang on your shoulders with your fingers. Now take a deep breath—this is the third deep breath—and press your fingers deep across your shoulders and drag them across your shoulders to the forefront and lay your hands, one on top of the other, on your heart chakra in the middle of your chest. And let go.

TS: Thank you.

DE: You're welcome.

TS: Now there's one more thing that I wanted to talk with you about today. I mean, there's hundreds of things, but I'll go right for this final topic, which is, I know that recently your daughter has been suffering a severe health crisis. And here you are, with all of these gifts as an energy healer, and I'm curious what the situation was like and how you handled it.

DE: Yes. Thank you. My daughter went through a fertility treatment to become pregnant. And they ODed her with too many hormones, and her body became one blood clot, and her blood wouldn't flow anymore. She's been healthy all of her life, she's a Middle Eastern dancer, and she's very important in my classes. And she was helicoptered out of the emergency room and I met her at the hospital. They said she would never live through the night because her blood was not flowing. It was interesting, she was all one blood clot, the only place that had blood was in her uterus, and her ovaries had blown up the size of cantaloupes, and her uterus was just going crazy. So she was bleeding just from her uterus, but she was all one blood clot.

So I just moved into the hospital. They said they didn't know what to do, because if they stopped her from bleeding, it means that they couldn't do anything to help make the blood thin for her blood clots. It was one thing contradicted the other. So I just started working on her with energy. One of the things I did was I sedated a meridian that governs the development and processing of blood, and of red blood cells. By sedating it, and taking the power away from it, it made the blood clots start to soften and finally flow. But on the other side, I had to do something to stop the bleeding. I just worked with energy, and it was a very scary thing. But she's out of the hospital and she's home, and we're all together.

TS: I mean, I can only imagine the intensity of having to use everything you've worked with your whole life to save your own daughter's life.

DE: Everything I've worked with all my life and also, again, having to see the uniqueness of everybody's energy that some of the things that I knew would work—I mean, it was unique to her, and how the hormones affected her. They've given hormones like this to other people, and maybe they got a baby out of it. But when they did it to her—and that's one of the things that I think is difficult about Western medicine. The pharmaceuticals are for everybody. It's general, and you don't know how something's going to affect you. And that's what happened to her. Her body did not do the right thing.

But what I have learned to do, and what I teach people to do—you know, people who study longer and really want to know this so well that they can practice on other people's bodies, but there are going to be times when you're going to come up against something [and] you don't know what do to. All of the basics are going to work, like straightening the energy out first, and make sure that they're not scrambled and everything can flow. But then, what do you do uniquely for them? I teach people how to track energy—like 150 years ago when people [had] to track across the country and there was no pathway, [I teach them] how to track energy when there is no pathway and it's not written yet. What do you do? And that's where I felt I went, because I had no pathway and nobody had written about this yet.

TS: Now, Donna, just the very last question I have is that you have such an unusual voice. Your voice is so bubbly, and I find you always seem so unbelievably happy and uplifted and high-spirited to me. And I'm curious, is it always like that for you?

DE: I love that you said that, by the way! That's why I said early on in the program [that] I am the person, more than any person on this planet, who ought to be teaching people how to activate their own radiant circuits, because my radiant circuits are activated. It means that my happiness, my joy, comes from such a deep place within me and has nothing to do with the world around me. It's like sometime bubbles up in me, and when I smile, I feel that smile down to my soul. That's the benefit of getting your radiant circuits really working. That's great, I'm glad you said that.

TS: As a final gift, because I want a little bit of this, I want some of this radiant circuit [energy], how can you help those of us who might desire more of this radiant circuitry flowing and bright energy like that?

DE: OK. Let's see. I think once a day, if you can find a place outside, not in a building, if you could just step outside somewhere and open your arms to the heavens—and I always call this "touching heaven with two hands"—and simply be in a receptive place. If you don't know where the circuits are, you don't have to know. If you just go into that receiving place, just, whoa, you're open to whatever the heavens can give you, whatever wisdom is there for you, whatever truth is there or whatever energy that can just come through you.

And if you stand out underneath a night sky or the daytime—and everybody will find this—your hands will begin to fill up with an energy. Nine times out of ten, people can feel it quite fast. Their hands begin to buzz or fill up with a warmth. And when you get to that place, you scoop that energy up and you put it in the middle of your heart chakra. There is an ancient vortex there that several different cultures call something like "heaven rushing in." And heaven rushes in with healing for you, or wisdom for you, or insight for you, or a little bit of joy for you, a little bit of that sunset energy coming into your body. The more you do it, the more you will receive it and get it, and start building up a habit so that you can have it more and more in your body.

TS: Wonderful. I've been speaking with Donna Eden. It's been a great joy, thank you so much. Thanks for all your generosity.

DE: Thank you, Tami, this was great.

TS: Donna has created [with Sounds True] The Energy Medicine Kit: Simple, Effective Techniques to Help You Boost Your Vitality and Feel Better Now. It's a kit that includes a DVD, it includes an audio with 21 energy medicine exercises on it, 43 photo-illustrated cards that go into detail about different energy medicine practices as well as a 28-page booklet.